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Editing Robert Burns in the Nineteenth Century G University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Selected Essays on Robert Burns by G. Ross Roy Robert Burns Collections 3-1-2018 Editing Robert Burns in the Nineteenth Century G. Ross Roy University of South Carolina - Columbia Publication Info 2018, pages 158-173. (c) G. Ross Roy, 1994; Estate of G. Ross Roy and Studies in Scottish Literature, 2018. First published in Kenneth Simpson, ed., Burns Now (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994), 129-149. This Chapter is brought to you by the Robert Burns Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Selected Essays on Robert Burns by G. Ross Roy by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EDITING ROBERT BURNS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1994) Most people think of editing as collecting together a series of essays by other people to form a more or less unified whole, or of a single person collecting or selecting the output of a single author, arranged in a particular order (chronological, subject matter, and so on), to which the editor may or may not add notes. But there is a good deal more to being an editor than that. In almost every edition the editor has had to make choices, sometimes the author himself acts in this capacity; having produced variant readings of a text, he at some later date opts for the one or the other. John Masefield, for example, could never quite decide how he wanted the opening line of his best-known poem “Sea Fever” to read. In the first edition it is “I must down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,” but this was later amended to “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” Some later printings, however, return to the earlier readings, while some retain the amendment. So one could argue that the earliest form of editing is that which the author applies to his own creations. Robert Burns made such a choice in “The Holy Fair” when at the suggestion of Hugh Blair he changed the original reading in the 1786 edition: For ****** speels the holy door, Wi’ tidings o’ s-lv-t—n to read “tidings o’ d-mn-t--n” in the edition of 1787 (Kinsley I: 132, ll. 101-102). Using major editions of 1800, two in 1834, 1856, 1877, two in 1896, and the two major twentieth-century editions of 1968 and 1986, I find that they all give the reading “damnation,” but that three of these EDITING BURNS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 159 editions do not indicate the earlier “salvation.”1 At the end of the poem, the word “houghmagandie” is glossed as “fornication” in the 1800 edition, but the word is not glossed in one of the 1834 editions and is called “loose behaviour” in the other. Thereafter it is again glossed as “fornication.” We can assume that Burns preferred “damnation” as more descriptive of the fire-and-brimstone type of preaching which was done at these holy fairs, because the reading was retained in Burns’s day in both the 1793 and 1794 editions of his poetry, and we know that he used a set of sheets of the earlier of these editions in setting up the 1794 one. In the two lines which I quoted above there is another form of editing exercised by the poet: in 1786 and 1787, the name “Moodie” is indicated ******. Half concealing a proper name in this way was, of course, commonplace in the eighteenth century, but it certainly was also a form of self-censorship or silent editing on the part of the author. Of the seven nineteenth-century editions I noted earlier, only James Currie in 1800 followed Burns with the use of asterisks—from caution, no doubt. There was another form of editing, the intervention of others than the author to make alterations in a text. One of the best-known of these concerns “Tam o’ Shanter” where in the manuscript that Burns sent to Francis Grose for inclusion in the Antiquities of Scotland (Vol. II, 1791), Burns added after: Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awefu’, Which even to name wad be unlawfu’ (Kinsley II: 561, ll. 141-142) these four lines: 1 The Works of Robert Burns; With an Account of his Life, ed. James Currie, 8th edn. 4 vols. (London, 1820), III, 33; The Works of Robert Burns; With his Life, ed. Allan Cunningham, 8 vols. (London, 1834), II, 107; The Works of Robert Burns, ed. the Ettrick Shepherd [James Hogg] and William Motherwell, 5 vols. (Glasgow, 1834-6), I, 30; The Life and Works of Robert Burns, ed. Robert Chambers, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1856-7), I, 266; The Works of Robert Burns, ed. William Scott Douglas, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1877-9), I, 272; The Life and Works of Robert Burns, ed. Robert Chambers, rev. William Wallace, 4 vols. (Edinburgh & London, 1896), I, 361; The Poetry of Robert Burns, ed. W.E. Henley and T.F. Henderson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1896-7), I, 40; The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1968), I, 132; The Complete Works of Robert Burns, ed. James A. Mackay (Alloway, 1986), p. 136. Further references to these editions will appear in the text. The editions of 1968 and 1986 were noted to show continuity into this century, but will not be cited further. 160 EDITING BURNS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Three Lawyers’ tongues, turn’d inside out, Wi’ lies seam’d like a beggar’s clout; Three Priests’ hearts, rotten, black as muck, Lay stinking, vile, in every neuk. These lines were removed from the poem when it was reprinted in Burns’s edition of 1793 upon the advice of Alexander Fraser Tytler, himself a lawyer.2 Perhaps where the lines appear in the poem they do contradict what the poet has said in the preceding line, because Burns claims that the mere naming of them “wad be unlawfu’,” so that the poem may in fact benefit from omitting them, although Tytler’s suggestion that the passage be removed was probably a question of giving offence rather than improving “Tam o’Shanter” as a work of art. I have mentioned censorship, and it must be admitted censorship and editing overlap, and continue to overlap in almost all of the editions of Burns’s work which I shall consider in this essay. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editor saw no impropriety in thus “cleansing” the mouth of Scotia’s Bard. Keeping back from the public poems which he had written was, in Burns’s case, just being prudent—thus “Holy Willie’s Prayer” was published only once (in 1789) during the poet’s lifetime, and that was surely a piracy of which he knew nothing. The serious question of editing Burns’s work arose only after his death. Soon after Burns’s funeral friends realised that his family would be destitute unless assistance was forthcoming. An edition of his works was agreed upon, the profits from which were to be made over to Mrs Burns. We need not here go into the difficulty there was in finding someone, preferably someone who had known Burns quite well, to take up the task of editing the poet’s works; it suffices to say that finally the job fell to Dr James Currie (1756-1805), a native of Dumfriesshire who had spent most of his working life in Liverpool. Certainly Currie knew Scotland and the literature of the country, although he had met the poet only once.3 Currie set about collecting material for his edition, which was to be a major biography and was to include all of Burns’s poems and songs as well as 2 [After this essay was written, Professor Roy purchased Tytler’s copy of the separate printing (“proof sheet’) of the Grose pages, on which Tytler marked these lines for deletion; the marked copy is now in the Roy Collection, University of South Carolina Libraries. Eds.] 3 See R. D. Thornton, James Currie, the Entire Stranger, and Robert Burns (Edinburgh & London, 1963). EDITING BURNS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 161 his correspondence (Robert Heron had published a Memoir of the Life of the Late Robert Burns in 1797 but it ran to only a few pages and is today of interest only to the literary historian). In the event Currie turned up very few new poems, relying on the two-volume set of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect of 1793 and James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, five of the six volumes of which had appeared by the year of Burns’s death. In order to write a biography Currie needed, in addition to direct contact with friends, to have available letters from and to the poet. Like most people of the period, Burns had kept most of his, but it was not uncommon for correspondents to request the return of their letters when the addressee died, and it is not improbable that some were returned in this way. Apparently Maria Riddell exchanged the poet’s letters to her for hers to him, and she appears to have destroyed them. The most notorious collection of Burn’s letters to be withheld, and quite understandably, were those to Mrs. Agnes M’Lehose (the famous “Clarinda”) from her “Sylvander.” These love letters to a woman whose husband was still living, although not with her, were published in part in an unauthorized edition in 1802, but it was not until 1843 that the lady’s grandson published a complete edition of the Clarinda-Sylvander correspondence.
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